Slow Motion Sounds

Available for over a year

In his book Writings About Music, from 1967, the composer Steve Reich writes about the idea to ”very gradually slow down a recorded sound to many times its original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all”. At the time the idea was a concept on paper, because it was technologically impossible to realise. Inspired by this idea, the Stockholm-based Swedish artist Milo Lavén explores the modern computers possibilities to slowing down sounds. Just as extreme slow motion in film allows one to see minute details, normally impossible to see, slow motion sounds let you hear details and harmonics that one would never notice otherwise. It lets one stay in the sonic moment and wander around to explore hidden aspects of the sound. The smallest sound can become a vast soundscape with subtle harmonies and undulating harmonics drifting through. Sounds from a horn section in Berlin, an amateur choir in Stockholm and other musical sounds are here, step by step, slowed down to many times their original length and gradually revealing more and more of the sonic hidden world within.